


From Henrietta, with Love

by hulklinging



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alive Noah, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Future, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Burn, Sometimes People Become Their Parents, Sometimes they all meet in their early twenties and fall in love anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-10 23:29:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13512012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hulklinging/pseuds/hulklinging
Summary: Adam comes home reluctantly, searching for something called the Greywaren. He never expected any of this.





	From Henrietta, with Love

**Author's Note:**

> In the middle of the night, the phrase 'Adam as a Grey Man' came into my head and wouldn't leave.

On a day late enough in June that the wealthy Raven Boys had already spread their wings and left for beaches and cabins and other places only a loaded parent and a good dose of entitlement can take you, a stranger drives into town and heads to a little house on Fox Way.

This man has a name on his license that is not his own. The car is rented, workable but not recognizable, which would almost work as a description for the man himself. Surely that was what he was going for, in a grey suit and no visible weapons. The magic detecting equipment would be easily mistaken for junk, or perhaps the tinkerings of a man with clever hands. This man's hands, curled around his steering wheel, do not quite fit the picture of a businessman. Too many caluses, a few scarred knuckles and a finger that doesn't quite straighten. His face is simply too interesting to be easily looked by, strange and almost jarring in how it's been laid out, with freckles that never quite faded completely.

He is returning home, although he doubts anyone will recognize him. In fact, he is counting on it.

He parks in front of his destination, and he knows he is in the right place, although he has never been here. Not just because of the sensors, but because of the sign.

Psychics. The psychics of 300 Fox Way. They're not why he came home, but they're a good place to start, or so he's been told.

He knocks once, and it's familiar enough of a feeling that the anxiety growing in his ribcage is almost tricked into believing they are in another small town, somewhere else entirely. But Adam Parrish has always been far too smart for his own good. It's how he got the crooked finger, what he owed every scar on his body to and the reason he never sat with his left side to the wall.

Somewhere deep inside of him, he recognizes the dirt underneath his feet. Home, for the first time in over three years.

If he had any choice in the matter, he would have never come back. But when you work for Colin Greenmantle, you don't always get to choose.

He knocks a second time, and the door opens.

* * *

Someone is knocking on the door.

Blue waits for someone else to get it and continues attempting to make two skirts into one. It isn't until the knock comes again that she remembers she's the only one home, aside from Orla, who is officially on phone duty for at least another hour or two.

Blue scowls, and looks out her window. Her scowl only intensifies when she catches sight of the man on the other side of their door. Expensive looking, which means she should probably take this one. If it was a regular, they'd take one look at who was answering the door and say they'd come back later, because anyone who came back often had a favourite, and that favourite was never Blue. She doesn't take it personally. It's not her role here, to have regular customers.

No, Blue's specialty is the ones who come for the novelty. They want to see the witches, and Blue, with her spiky, uneven hair and patchwork clothes, will do just as well as any of the women with actual talent for reading the future.

They're never interested in actually listening, anyway. Better not to waste anyone else's time.

She opens the door right as he's about to knock a third time. Impatient. Of course he is. He takes her in, and she takes him in. He drops his hand but doesn't put it anywhere in particular. Blue notes he seems hyperaware of the space he takes up, unusual for men dressed as nicely as him. That doesn't change anything. Faux-considerate or not, she knows what a rich man looks like.

Rich men are assholes, whether they're Raven Boys or some other brand of intitled. She has no time for them on principle.

He doesn't offer his name, only a polite hello, so she doesn't give hers, either.

"Here for a reading?"

He nods, and she looks at him and decides he looks like a tarot card kind of person. Which is good, because she doesn't want to sit and drink tea with him anyway.

"Follow me."

Blue leads him to their sitting room, grabbing her deck off a shelf as she sits down and sets the scene, shuffling her deck with calloused fingers. She leaves it uncut, setting it to the left of her and beckoning the man to take the seat across from her.

He doesn't, and she frowns. She knows what men who look like this need to hear. Well dressed, ambitious types. They want to be told they will devour the world, and she'll offer that for a price. Often, she tries to hint that the price is giving back to the world in some way. She had a man donate half a million dollars to Amazon conservation, a few years ago.

Blue Sargent is no psychic, but she is very good at this.

The man doesn't sit, and instead looks around, taking in the magical charms disguised as knickknacks and the knickknacks disguised as magic charms.

"I asked around about 300 Fox Way, before I came." His voice is strange, and she thinks if she pulls at the edges she knows what it will unravel into, but she lets him speak a little longer, just to be sure. "A lot of patrons speak highly of it. Most of them mentioned a young woman. Blunt, brilliant. Told them what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear."

That was her in a nutshell. She narrows her eyes at this man, wanting to tug at the bark of him, see what he's hiding. The vocabulary sounds learned, a conscious vocabulary rather than one inherited. And there's something in the lines of him, something dangerous.

"I also heard that all the women here really do have some kind of Sight. All of them but one." And he turns back towards her, meeting her eyes with a level gaze he must have learned special. "Is that you?"

"Who's going around telling that story?" She asks, because that's not something many people know. It's something best kept in the family, and everyone knows that.

"An aunt, I think? Her name was Neeve."

Blue sits up straighter, shedding the play. "Neeve is dead."

"Yes, she was hard to get a hold of."

She stands up, mapping the best way to get around him, if this goes more sideways than it already has. She's got her pink blade in her pocket, but doesn't feel like having a conversation with the cops today.

"Those men didn't need a psychic. They weren't going to listen to anyone giving advice. They wanted someone to tell them what to do, and that's what I did. It's pretty common, for powerful men. It's why so many of them drop so much money on dominatrixes. I just can't be bothered to shave my legs, so I do it my way instead. It's the same thing."

"Is it?" He shifts, and there's some unease in his posture. Finally. This man talks of meeting the dead with no issue, but falters at the mention of a dominatrix? Blue tucks that thought away for later. "Tell me something real."

"That accent trick must work nicely in the big cities," she says, without thinking too hard about it. "But now that you're home, your roots are showing. How long has it been since you left?"

And this does shake him. He goes pale under his freckles, and Blue enjoys the sight of his eyes going wide. He really is pretty, once she looks past the cold suit. Big eyes, features just odd enough to grab her attention. He looks like an illustration for a changeling. He looks otherworldly, even as his accent drags like Henrietta dirt.

"Was that too real for you, then?"

After a long moment, he regains his composure. "I wouldn't call it the same thing." He's backtracking, not going for the door she's opened, and she lets him. "I somehow doubt that men go to sex workers expecting some kind of magic."

Blue smiles, and it's all teeth, teeth, teeth. "Don't they?"

He doesn't sit, but he reaches down, picks up the cards like he wants to look through them but doesn't want her to see. She wonders what cards he'd be looking for.

"I'm looking for something," he says. "Something magic."

"And you found the only non-magic thing in here." She hides her bitterness well, she thinks. "You're doing so well."

He's still staring at the cards. The back of them is twisting, meaningless vines, and they are as grandiose as they are mundane. Blue pulls them out for most of her readings, saves her own deck for herself. Not that a good deck tells her much more than one for show.

Sometimes, she's tempted to pick up her mother's deck, but no one's touched that since Maura left, and Blue won't be the first one to disturb that dust.

"Does anyone here specialize in artifacts?" He asks, finally, and Blue thinks about the man with the stall at the farmer's market, the only one the women of Fox Way trust for their produce and the herbs they can't grow themselves. Blue thinks about how sometimes impossible things appear around him, how his vegetables don't wither and always seem a little too bright, which always struck her as amusing, because there was nothing bright about this boy, who was sharp enough to dash anyone against the rocks if they weren't careful.

"I wouldn't tell you, even if they did," she says, and watches his hand tense around the cards, and then slowly relax.

"Okay." Just okay. Like he accepts that. It's almost enough to throw her. "Thank you for your time."

He lifts the top card, just enough to see the edge of it. Something changes in his face, and Blue doesn't know if it's anger or fear or some strange mix of the two. He drops the deck, and the sound it makes as it hits the table is louder than it should be. If it weren't for a few crooked cards, it would be like he hadn't picked it up at all.

"See you around some time, Henrietta," she says, because she's always been one for getting that last word in. He doesn't respond to her, but he doesn't run out either, just turns and walks out. Blue waits until she hears a car engine start before she reaches out and removes the top card, and then she carefully removes the cards that were left sticking out of the deck. She doesn't flip them, not yet, just leaves them face down on the table. Six of them. A strange number for a reading, not a number she favours.

She gets up and closes the door, locking it before she lets herself think about the decision too hard. Let Orla tease her for being paranoid. The last time a strange man had come poking around, her mother had disappeared. She's older now. If this man, with his borrowed words and his hidden accent and his quick hands, has come to cause trouble, she will make him wish he had never come back home at all.


End file.
